Senator Marshall: Insurance Companies Wrote Obamacare
Senator Marshall Details Republican Healthcare Plan & Calls Out Failed ACA
Washington – On Wednesday, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, M.D. (R-Kansas), questioned witnesses including Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Ph.D., President of American Action Forum, Jason Levitis, Senior Health Policy Fellow at Urban Institute, Brian Blasé, Ph.D., President of Paragon Health Institute, and Bartley Armitage, at the Senate Finance Committee Hearing focused on meaningful solutions to the rising cost of health care.
Click HERE or on the image above to watch Senator Marshall’s full exchange.
Highlights from the hearing include:
Senator Marshall: “Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome to our guests. I recall sitting in the doctor’s lounge, maybe a month or three after Obamacare was passed, and there were two conclusions in that lounge. Number one is, oh my gosh, the insurance companies have written this bill. We said that because there was going to be an estimated $50 billion of subsidies going directly to the insurance companies, and today that’s grown to $150 billion a year. So American taxpayers are paying insurance companies exactly $150 billion a year.”
“The other conclusion was that this overregulation would lead to consolidation of the industries. I mean, it was very evident that the same thing was happening in banking. We knew that this was going to take nurses off the floor and bring them into data entry positions as well. We knew the small doctors’ offices; small hospitals could never take on all this overregulation.”
“So here we are 15 years later, and we understand that Obamacare has been an abstract failure. You know, I say this because your premiums alone, going up 200% in many cases. No one can argue that the ACA has led to premium increase. I draw attention specifically going from 2020 to 2025. You know, it just takes off. The premiums take off. Well, why, we started adding in these enhanced Biden subsidies as well? And the insurance companies jacked up their premiums to go along with that.”
“And then I think the other thing to point out is that just because you have Obamacare doesn’t mean you have access to care. If you’re a single person with a deductible of $5,000, if you’re a family of four with a deductible of almost $15,000, and you’re making less than 400% of [the] poverty level, there’s no way that that’s access to care. So, I came here saying that there’s three principles.”
“Since 2016, I ran on fixing health care in Congress. I said that we need to do two things. Number one is we need to make patients consumers again. Number two is we need to promote transparency, price tags. And if you did those two things, if you made patients consumers, again, you presented the consumers with options, then innovation would occur. Once again, no one can do innovation right now because there’s so many guardrails around what you can do or not do. We spent about four years promoting that, and now it’s kind of catching on. But the other thing I did is I read a book called The Singapore Model in 2021, and was intrigued with how they took, federal dollars and put them in what I would call an HSA account type. And even more exciting was if you kept two years’ worth of premium of your deductibles, you could eventually turn that into a retirement plan.”
“So I started, I tried to share this marketing, this concept of taking federal dollars and putting them into an HAS-like account, as opposed to giving them to insurance companies. That would do two things that would make the patients number one, consumers. And then you add up our price tags bill, and all of a sudden, you got a win-win opportunity, and the innovation is going to follow.”
“I think what we will be offering as Republicans are real solutions. We do need to address the fraud, whether it’s there or not there. We’ll figure it out. But I think that just the simplest thing is, even if a person is paying 5 or $10 as opposed to $0, that’s going to cut back on some of the fraud. You know, we’ve been talking to several people who have talked about these HSA accounts going towards the consumers the same way with the CSR is, of course, then give those to the consumers as well.”
“I’m really excited about reintroducing some type of reinsurance back at the state level. Senator Collins has legislation, in the past, and certainly, Maine has had some success. So, I think there’s successful reinsurance programs out there. And then one of our signature bills is the Patients Deserve Price Tags Bill, which would also be a part of the package. I think that would bring down premiums as well.”
“Mr. Blase, I’ll take a deep breath here. I covered a lot of items, but do you believe that if we made the patients consumers again, if we give them price tags, transparency, do you believe that innovation would follow and that premiums could hopefully come down again?”
Mr. Blase: “Yes, I agree. We need to create a health sector that serves the patient and where the patient is in control, rather than a health system that is so insurance company-dominated. One of the big problems with the ACA is how much power it gave to health insurance companies. In addition to all those subsidies, it also would put in place a tax penalty for people that didn’t buy their product.”
Senator Marshall: “It was a giant gift to big health insurance companies. And we need to move the power away from giant health insurance companies back to individual patients and families.”
“One other in our package of bills we would consider, Senator Sheehy has legislation that would make it easier for small businesses to get their employees into the ACA and hopefully have a healthier pool of people in the ACA, rather than the opposite of what’s occurring as well. And I think that’s due in some tax structure as well.”
“I’ll just end with this. I hope that my friends across the aisle shared the same goals that we do that we want to make health care affordable, meaningful, and accessible to everybody. And we have to stop talking just about how do we make transfer premiums from the consumer to the federal government? I think a solution where we just shift the ship, the cost from the consumer to the federal government, is just going to continue to inflate insurance prices as well. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.”
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Contact: Payton Fuller
